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Linfield 0 Rangers 2: Captain survives injury scare

MEANINGLESS matches occasionally go out of their way to assert their self-importance. This warm-up game had been eddying along on a lukewarm setting until, in an instant, a chill ripped into the balmy Belfast afternoon. The unexpected twist arrived, in an all too literal form, for Barry Ferguson.

The Rangers captain, a welcome splash of colour amid a generally pallid cast, pulled up clutching his leg in the aftermath of an inoffensive tackle. He hobbled to the touchline and was immediately urged towards the dressing room by the visiting bench. Alex McLeish, a central figure in that cluster of concern, must have feared that such an academic fixture was about to impart the harshest of lessons. Instead, to his obvious relief, his star pupil was diagnosed with nothing more sinister than a dead leg, a fitting injury for the final breaths of a long-since moribund fixture.